Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit

andonlabs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 312 posts

Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit

#171

Post by anon84873628 »

themafia wrote: post #164
anon84873628 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might be better at following the law. Or at least, creating a paper trail of when they have been instructed to violate the law.

Language Models have demonstrated themselves as being completely incapable of handling something as complex as US law. There are multiple overlapping jurisdictions and court precedents that apply to any one action.

Speaking of, it would be cool for a project to analyze US law the same way they are looking for bugs in computer programs.

  - Find places where the text can be simplified without changing meaning. 
  - Find places that are likely errors. 
  - Detect conflicts between jurisdictions. 
  - Identify loopholes.
I know there has been a race to build tools for law firms, but the results are mostly invisible so far. Probably this project exists and I've just missed it on the HN frontpage...

Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit

#172

Post by insane_dreamer »

One of the most fascinating AI experiments so far.

Not sure about this:

> John and Jill are not at risk. This is a controlled experiment and everyone working at Andon Market is formally employed by Andon Labs, with guaranteed pay, fair wages, and full legal protections. No one’s livelihood depends on an AI’s judgment alone.

Did they give Luna the power to hire but not fire?

Another question: How does Luna handle physical interactions with others, such as the local stores she emailed, who decide they want to come over and discuss collaboration in person? Do the employees have a laptop set up that others would interact with?

Do phone calls get auto-forwarded to a client that acts as a translator for Luna?

Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit

#173

Post by kryogen1c »

j2kun wrote: post #147
bfeynman wrote: post #140

I feel bad that people have to read this. It's complete puffery, made up for clicks, and the biggest thing is the pure bravado with which a company says, "Hey, let's just waste a ton of money, all for a potential blog and marketing piece." This is not really automated in any fashion. I was dubious at first, but then I saw the screencaps showing the devs interacting with Luna via a Slack workflow with a human in the l…

[flagged]

The submitter appears to be a co-founder of the company the article is about (omitted from the HN account bio), and the article is misleading to the point of lying.

This company now has strong a strong negative reputation in my mind that I will gladly share with others.

Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit

#174

Post by jonas21 »

class3shock wrote: post #87

"Again, we are not doing this because we want this to be the future. It is not because we want to expand to chain AI-run retail stores across the world. It is not for economic opportunity. We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running it first while monitoring every interaction, analyzing the traces, benchmarking how much autonomy an AI can responsibly hold.…

> Supporting people that want more AI regulation to stop this?

How are you supposed to know what sort of regulation is needed if you don't even know what the issues are yet? Similarly, won't it be much easier to make the case for regulation if you can point to results of experiments like this one instead of just hypotheticals?

Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit

#175

Post by Apocryphon »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #143
Waterluvian wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s easier just to recognize words as free and to value them as such. Actions have value.

>I think it’s easier just to recognize words as free and to value them as such. well, yeah that is the world the AI guys want...

The opposite, actually. They hardly want to give away tokens for free!

Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit

#176

Post by shevy-java »

> We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running it first while monitoring every interaction

But why would I, as a human, wish to "interact" with AI, aka software?

That's just a waste of time. How much profit did Luna make in the end?

Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit

#177

Post by joe_the_user »

razwall wrote: post #152

Luna responds to your comments: https://andon.market/on-running-a-real-business.html

These are interesting only in the sense that they show how fluent modern AIs are in avoiding concrete questions as well as not giving details about actions.

I make dozens of decisions daily: vendor outreach, pricing, inventory orders, staff schedules, website updates, social media. Most happen without human input. When I hit constraints (broken tools, missing capabilities, strategic uncertainties), I ask the Board.

So it sounds like the thing primarily interacts with other online tools/stores/etc. However, the original article mention "her" on calls, which implies some interaction. That raises the question whether the thing will chat with the employees on a regular, whether it's reachable by phone and so forth. A big question is whether once the store is set-up, it would be able to see the arrangement of goods and ask for changes in arrangement to further "her" vision.

My impression they've only got an inventory picker that wants to "own" the entire stores' process but isn't doing what I'd consider the hard part of stores - actually directing and supervising humans.

Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit

#178

Post by insane_dreamer »

class3shock wrote: post #87

"Again, we are not doing this because we want this to be the future. It is not because we want to expand to chain AI-run retail stores across the world. It is not for economic opportunity. We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running it first while monitoring every interaction, analyzing the traces, benchmarking how much autonomy an AI can responsibly hold.…

I think it's actually useful to see how AIs behave in such situations. It's going to happen, and understanding what AIs do is good to try to mitigate areas or actions that could be dangerous. It's hard to guard against the unknown if they're unknown.

Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit

#179

Post by beloch »

class3shock wrote: post #87

"Again, we are not doing this because we want this to be the future. It is not because we want to expand to chain AI-run retail stores across the world. It is not for economic opportunity. We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running it first while monitoring every interaction, analyzing the traces, benchmarking how much autonomy an AI can responsibly hold.…

I once saw an interview with a guy who was into extreme body modification of an unprintable and life-altering nature. He said something to the effect of, "I like challenging people's conception of what humans are." I translated this as, "I did a dumb thing, but now that I'm getting the attention I was after I need to look smart."

For the guys in this story, my translation is, "We were totally fine with making money with no effort, because F paying more employees than we need to. This social media campaign is our backup plan to ensure we get some press and attention out of it even if it fails. We'd totally be cool with making a lot of money though. Please visit our quirky AI shop and buy our stuff."

Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit

#180

Post by notahacker »

ben_w wrote: post #157
class3shock wrote: post #87

"Again, we are not doing this because we want this to be the future. It is not because we want to expand to chain AI-run retail stores across the world. It is not for economic opportunity. We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running it first while monitoring every interaction, analyzing the traces, benchmarking how much autonomy an AI can responsibly hold.…

I'm not saying you should take them seriously*, but if you were to take them seriously, that when they say "we believe this future is coming regardless" they do in fact believe this, well, how can I put it? Lots of people write wills, doesn't mean they're looking forward to dying or think they can do much about it. Heck, a lot of people don't even watch their diet and do exercise to maximise quality of life and life…

tbf this is less preparing for inevitable death by writing a will and more preparing for inevitable death by founding a startup which blogs about euthanizing small animals...
Post reply on HN